Free The Girl Is Murder by Kathryn Miller Haines Page B

that?”
    “They don’t like me. They think I’m a cold cut.” She cocked her head again and met my eyes, obviously daring me to disagree with their diagnosis.
    “That’s a terrible thing to call someone.” I knew it probably wasn’t what she wanted to hear, but I also wasn’t sure I was ready to tell her people were wrong about her. My eyes unconsciously circled the room, looking to see who, if anyone, was watching us talk. Weird was contagious. I knew how it worked. Just sitting next to Pearl would set me up in people’s minds as someone just like her.
    And yet she’d gotten me the photos.
    She picked up another cookie and shoved it into her mouth. There was only one left on the plate, and I realized that she hadn’t gotten them to share with me; her intention, all along, had been to eat them herself. Maybe she assumed I wouldn’t stick around long enough to enjoy them. “Paul says it’s my own fault,” she said.
    “That doesn’t seem very fair.”
    “It’s probably why he invited you out with us that first day. He thinks I need friends.”
    “You don’t agree?”
    “I had them. They’re the ones who couldn’t cope.”
    I’m not sure how I knew what had happened—maybe it was intuition, or maybe my weeks of observation were paying off—but I suddenly realized that when Pearl said they started calling her Pearl Harbor “after,” she wasn’t referring to December 7, 1941. Her brother’s death had started all this. Her friends couldn’t stand the doom and gloom that descended on her when she’d lost someone she’d loved. And she wasn’t strong enough to fight the changes the grief had made in her.
    I knew that change. Last year I’d been a completely different person. What did I worry about back then? A new pimple that blazed on my cheek the day class photos were taken. The way last year’s waistbands strained against this year’s waist. Whether or not my breasts would ever fill my brassiere.
    I didn’t worry about war. I didn’t think about my father, serving in someplace called Pearl Harbor. In fact, I rarely thought about Pop at all. As for Mama, she flitted around the edges, always smiling, and convincing me that I would be all right as long as there was the two of us. It had been just the two of us for so long.
    And then it was all gone. Mama dead. Pop returned, but different. And the house, the school, the friends—all traded for a dingy brownstone on Orchard Street that smelled of Mrs. Mrozenski’s cabbage rolls. And why the change? The war, of course. It ruined everything. Including me.
    We were alike, Pearl and I. And she knew it, which was why she was telling me all this.
    I looked back toward the front door of the club, where the girl with cat’s-eye specs had been joined by another girl, this one in pearls and a plaid blazer. They caught me looking at them and quickly turned away. Former friends of Pearl’s, I’d bet, wondering how it was that she’d found a new friend to spend the evening with.
    “You’re interesting, though,” said Pearl. “I kept hoping you’d come back to the newspaper office.” She lifted the last cookie. Instead of sending it to her mouth, she extended it my way. “Want one?”
    “No, thanks.” I looked at the checkerboard. I was being slaughtered. It was a matter of minutes before the game was over and she was declared the victor.
    “So what do you think of P.S. 110?” she asked.
    “It’s different.”
    “I always wanted to go to a private all-girls school.” She knew that about me, too. How? She must’ve seen the question in my eyes. “I work in the office during study hall, helping with attendance. Anyhow, that’s how I know you went to Chapin.”
    I nodded, not feeling as reassured as she thought that news might make me. “So you work for the newspaper and the office?”
    “I don’t really work for the paper. I just hang out there with Paul in the morning so I don’t have to talk to anyone. He hates it, but he hates